CES2005 and new Samsung SC-X105

[meduus 0]

http://gear.ign.com/articles/578/578312p1.html?fromint=1

Pretty nice new little toy from samsung. I'm thinking of trading my good old PC101 for this baby. The idea of having a water resistant camera plus bulletcam in one extremly small package and for a price below $800 starts to appeal me more and more :)

[dan567 0]

Hey man, I heard the hard drive doesn't work at altitute... Any truth to that?

You try it first, then I'll see if I want one.

[kelpdiver 2]

looks like it uses internal memory and memory stick, so no hard drives. But product is still listed as RSN.

BTW, the microdrives are only rated to 8 or 10k, but have been used on mountains up to 14.5 without trouble.

Longer thread on this camera further down on the page under Samsung. But not much more detail known.

[velocityphoto 0]

Save all your money guys !!!! Someone bought one at our dz and i did my assumption of it ,and it has very poor video quality ! No way would i dream of using this camera for a paying customers video ...
As far as microdrives go ,they will not work above 7000 ft. they will malfunction on you i promise! This coming from a voice of 1st hand experience . I had one for my d-30 and used it or should i say tried using it ,and it only would work for maybe 1 or 2 shots on the exit and stop untill i got down to a lower opening altitude ,if it worked at all . Then after countless times landing with no photo's i found out from someone that microdrives don't work at 7000 ft. ......

A friend will bail you out of jail , a REAL friend will be sitting next to you in the cell slapping your hand saying "DUDE THAT WAS AWSUM " ................

[kelpdiver 2]

I've got pictures taken at the top of Mt Shasta in a G2 digital. That's 14,162.

Obviously freefall is a wild environment, but I wonder what causes the experience you had. Did you try more than one of them?

[velocityphoto 0]

Only 1 of them but i wouldnt try using them now anyways since compact flash is cheap now.

A friend will bail you out of jail , a REAL friend will be sitting next to you in the cell slapping your hand saying "DUDE THAT WAS AWSUM " ................

[AndyMan 7]

Quote

Obviously freefall is a wild environment, but I wonder what causes the experience you had. Did you try more than one of them?

Every manual for every microdrive ever produced lists a maximum operating environment of 10,000 feet.

I can certainly understand that there are exceptions to the rule, but be sure to clearly understand - microdrives should be expected to fail if used much above 10,000 feet.

When I use the work "fail", I don't just mean "stop working". I mean catestrophic media failure. I mean the heads impacting the spinning disk surface and doing major physical damage. It's very likely that not only will you not be able to save data, you're likely to never be able to read data already stored on the disk, even when you're back on the ground.

IBM/Hitachi Microdrive functional spec: http://www.hitachigst.com/tech/techlib.nsf/techdocs/6EF902390528609A87256AC000679FD3/$file/dscm_sp40.PDF. See page 21.

I believe you when you say you've used it at altitude and didn't damange your drive, but understand that is only because you were lucky.

15,000 feet MSL is %50 over max.

_Am

__

You put the fun in "funnel" - craichead.

[kelpdiver 2]

Quote

[I believe you when you say you've used it at altitude and didn't damange your drive, but understand that is only because you were lucky.

15,000 feet MSL is %50 over max.

I don't believe that to be so - quite a few have managed to do it. The difference in pressure, which is the key of this, is not all that great. Standard pressure is 20.57in @ 10,000, 16.88@15,000. That's not even 20% over.

The 10k certification - not all that different from the 254lb threshhold. With much the country having a high point of less than a thousand, it's no surprise they wouldn't worry about putting that value down.

[PhreeZone 15]

Lots of big wall climbers and mountianeers are finding out the hard way just how touchy hard drives are at elevation. iPods failed like crazy at approach camps (some even failed in Base Camp) to K2 and Everest last year. Even on lesser peaks the forces needed to severly damage the drives was so minimal that many units were trashed last year.

From the mountianering photography that I've been keeping up with no serious photographer would take a microdrive up to altitude, instead they are all carrying many large multiple gig flash cards.

Yesterday is history
And tomorrow is a mystery

Parachutemanuals.com

[kelpdiver 2]

certainly these days there's little reason to use microdrive anymore. 1 and 2G CF is cheap.